I would point out that Google has been “carbon neutral” with it’s data centers for quite some time, unlike others who still rape the environment ahem AWS.
Carbon offsets? Yes indeed. The easiest, most useless way to reach carbon neutral.
carbon neutral is when you don’t emit it in the first place, not by paying someone else to promise to make up for it later.
I’m genuinely curious where their penny picking went? All of tech companies shove ads into our throats and steal our privacy justifying that by saying they operate at loss and need to increase income. But suddenly they can afford spending huge amounts on some shit that won’t give them any more income. How do they justify it then?
It’s another untapped market they can monopolize. (Or just run at a loss because investor’s are happy with another imaginary pot of gold at the end of another rainbow.)
Perception. If a company isn’t on the leading edge we don’t consider them the best.
Regardless if you use them or not, if Google didn’t touch AI but Edge did you would believe edge is more advanced.
It doesn’t even need to appeal to you the user, but given the AI Gold Rush, they would have very unhappy investors if they did not.
Very good point
Because data is king and sessions are going to be worth a lot more than searches. Go through the following
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Talk to a LLM about what product to buy
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Search online for a product to buy
Which one gives out more information about yourself?
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This is terrible. Why don’t we build nuclear power plants, rollout a carbon tax, and put incentives for companies to make their own energy via renewables?
You know the shit that we should have been doing before I was born.
If only Google had a working search engine before AI
Yes, but now we can get much worse results and three pages of ads for ten times the energy cost. Capitalism at its finest.
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I use generative ai sometimes, and I find it useful for certain usecases.
Are you just following the in ternate hate bandwagon or do you really think it’s no good?
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The annoying part is how many mainstream tech companies have ham-fisted AI into every crevice of every product. It isn’t necessary and I’m not convinced it results in a “better search result” for 90% of the crap people throw into Google. Basic indexed searches are fine for most use cases.
As a buzzword or whatever this is leagues worse than “agile”, which I already loathed the overuse/integration of.
Before AI it was IoT. Nobody asked for an Internet connected toaster or fridge…
I always felt like I was alone in this thinking. I think anyone with a bit of a security mindset don’t want everything connected, besides it makes them more expensive and easier to break.
It definitely has to walk in the desert for a while. I know multiple people who like it for some stuff. Like cameras and managing air conditioning.
Ban them
Just don’t use them.
Tell that to schools or companies etc. You can’t just not use them. Maybe you can, but not everyone has that luxury.
I skimmed the article, but it seems to be assuming that Google’s LLM is using the same architecture as everyone else. I’m pretty sure Google uses their TPU chips instead of a regular GPU like everyone else. Those are generally pretty energy efficient.
That and they don’t seem to be considering how much data is just being cached for questions that are the same. And a lot of Google searches are going to be identical just because of the search suggestions funneling people into the same form of a question.
I hadn’t really heard of the TPU chips until a couple weeks ago when my boss told me about how he uses USB versions for at-home ML processing of his closed network camera feeds. At first I thought he was using NVIDIA GPUs in some sort of desktop unit and just burning energy…but I looked the USB things up and they’re wildly efficient and he says they work just fine for his applications. I was impressed.
Yeah they’re pretty impressive for some at home stuff and they’re not even that costly.
The Coral is fantastic for use cases that don’t need large models. Object recognition for security cameras (using Blue Iris or Frigate) is a common use case, but you can also do things like object tracking (track where individual objects move in a video), pose estimation, keyphrase detection, sound classification, and more.
It runs Tensorflow Lite, so you can also build your own models.
Pretty good for a $25 device!
Exactly. The difference between a cached response and a live one even for non-AI queries is an OOM difference.
At this point, a lot of people just care about the ‘feel’ of anti-AI articles even if the substance is BS though.
And then people just feed whatever gets clicks and shares.
Googles tpu can’t handle llm’s lol. What do you mean “exactly”?
In fact, Gemini was trained on, and is served, using TPUs.
Google said its TPUs allow Gemini to run “significantly faster” than earlier, less-capable models.
Did you think Google’s only TPUs are the ones in the Pixel phones, and didn’t know that they have server TPUs?
I’m pretty sure Google uses their TPU chips
The Coral ones? They don’t have nearly enough RAM to handle LLMs. They only support small Tensorflow Lite models.
They might have some custom-made non-public chips though - a lot of the big tech companies are working on that.
instead of a regular GPU
I wouldn’t call them regular GPUs… AI use cases often use products like the Nvidia H100, which are specifically designed for AI. They don’t have any video output ports.
I switched to Kagi like 6 months ago and I still love it. Almost never have to go back to google except for maps.
If these guys gave a shit they’d focus on light based chips, which are in very early stages, but will save a lot of power.
you mean the IBM light chips and bus ?
AI is just what crypto bros moved onto after people realized that was a scam. It’s immature technology that uses absurd amounts of energy for a solution in search of a problem, being pushed as the future, all for the prospect of making more money. Except this time it’s being backed by major corporations because it means fewer employees they have to pay.
energy for a solution in search of a problem,
Except this time it’s being backed by major corporations because it means fewer employees they have to pay.
Ah yes the classic it is useless and here is a use for it logic.
I take it you haven’t had to go through an AI chat bot for support before huh
I have and don’t see the relevance. The argument is that it is useless and then mentions a use case. If you want to say it’s crap I won’t argue the point but you can’t say X and ~X.
Crypto has been hitting all time highs this year; there’s just more bros than before.
Crypto has been hitting all time highs this year; there’s just more bros than before.
There’s a sucker born every minute
Tell that to my wallet. I hold a little crypto and it’s down over 50%
There are legitimate uses of AI in certain fields like medical research and 3D reconstruction that aren’t just a scam. However, most of these are not consumer facing and the average person won’t really hear about them.
It’s unfortunate that what you said is very true on the consumer side of things…
I would love to see an AI make an ANSYS model that isn’t shit. They might be able to make cute pictures, but when it comes to making models for CFD or FEA, AI is a complete waste of time.
If only they did what DuckDuckGo did and made it so it only popped up in very specific circumstances, primarily only drawing from current summarized information from Wikipedia in addition to its existing context, and allowed the user to turn it off completely in one click of a setting toggle.
I find it useful in DuckDuckGo because it’s out of the way, unobtrusive, and only pops up when necessary. I’ve tried using Google with its search AI enabled, and it was the most unusable search engine I’ve used in years.
DDG has also gotten much worse since the introduction of AI features.
I haven’t had any problems myself.
In fact, I regularly use their anonymized LLM Chat tab to help out with restructuring data, summarizing some more complex topics, or finding some info that doesn’t readily appear near the top of search. It’s made my search experience (again, specifically in my circumstance) much better than before.
Summary:
- AI’s rapid growth has transformed digital life, but its significant environmental impact remains largely unchecked.
- AI-powered features can consume up to 10 times more electricity than traditional searches, potentially equating to a country’s power usage.
- The proliferation of energy-intensive data centers powering AI is outpacing the electric grid’s capacity, forcing utilities to maintain fossil fuel plants for reliability.
- Estimates suggest AI could account for 9% of U.S. energy demand by 2030, substantially contributing to climate change.
- Lack of industry transparency and mandatory reporting makes quantifying AI’s full environmental toll difficult.
- Tech companies negotiate discounted utility rates, shifting costs to ratepayers and reducing incentives for energy efficiency.
- Government regulation has been slow and industry-influenced, focusing on hypothetical future risks over current, tangible harms.
- The burden of AI’s environmental impact disproportionately falls on Global South communities where data centers are located.
- Tech companies resist mandatory disclosures, prioritizing profits over sustainability while the public bears the physical costs.
Just curious. Do your summaries are made by you, human?
Used AI to summarize article about misuse of AI.
Genius.
Using AI the correct way 👌
And it’s only 10x more useless :)
All of this just to give rich shareholders even more money.
